India embraces cleanliness revolution
SOUTH Africa celebrated Human Rights Day two days ago. The day pays tribute to the struggle by ordinary people for equality and dignity, the principles which are inviolable and rightfully enshrined through Fundamental Fights in the constitution of India and Bill of Rights in the constitution of South Africa.
Lack of an enabling environment, however, obstructs the attainment of the goals set by our founding fathers. This also includes the most basic requirement of proper sanitation facilities in both countries.
The tragic incident a few days ago where a 5-year-old child was killed after falling into a pit toilet at a primary school in the Eastern Cape brought this issue to the fore and prompted this author to focus on a game-changer in India in the form of the Clean India Mission.
The lack of adequate sanitation and cleanliness in rural areas, in particular open defecation, are major developmental issues facing India. These are not just about construction of toilets, but much more complex, involving cultural and behavioural biases, coupled with the challenge of achieving scale.
The prime minister of India, on October 2, 2014, while India and the world were celebrating the 145th birth anniversary of Mahatma Gandhi, launched the Swachh Bharat (Clean India) Mission as a national movement to accelerate efforts to achieve universal sanitation coverage and to put focus on sanitation. The campaign aims to achieve the vision of a “Clean India” by October 2, 2019, the 150th birth anniversary of Gandhi.
Gandhi was a firm believer in the importance of sanitation and hygiene. For him, cleanliness was next to godliness. Gandhi said: “So long as you do not take the broom and the bucket in your hands, you cannot make your towns and cities clean.”
His stay in South Africa is much to be credited, for it was in South Africa where he gained the reputation as a fierce proponent of personal hygiene and sanitation. Gandhi made sanitation an integral part of his “Satyagrah” (holding firmly to truth).
Phoenix Settlement and Tolstoy Farm served as the ground for experimentation and propagation of his thoughts. He took up the cudgels against his family and fellow Indians in South Africa in his attempt to convince them of the importance of the twin principles.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi, while launching the Clean India Mission, said a clean India would be the best tribute it could pay to Gandhi in 2019.
Emphasising the link, a new slogan – “Satyagrahi” (one who holds firmly to truth) to “Swacchagrahi” (one who holds firmly to cleanliness) has been coined, with “Swacchagrahi” positioned as the changemaker, one who encourages and inspires others. Rightly so, the logo of the Clean India Mission resembles the iconic single wire glasses worn by Gandhi, with the tag line “A step towards cleanliness”.
The Clean India Mission focuses on the need to address a multidimensional challenge through a multisectoral approach with the involvement of multiple agencies. Thus, it is as much a mission for government as for public sector companies, corporate houses, celebrities as well as ordinary Indians.
The mission has a sub-mission each for rural and urban areas.
The vision of Clean India Mission (rural) is to make India “open defecation-free” by October 2, 2019. Its broad objectives are to bring about an improvement in the general quality of life in the rural areas by promoting cleanliness and hygiene, accelerate sanitation coverage in rural areas, motivate communities to adopt sustainable sanitation practices and facilities through awareness creation and health education, encourage cost-effective and appropriate technologies for ecologically safe and sustainable sanitation and, importantly, to create significant positive impact on gender and promote social inclusion by improving sanitation, especially in marginalised communities.
The programme also aims at promoting effective solid and liquid waste management and general cleanliness practices.
The enormity of the challenge is illustrated by the fact that India has more than 650 000 villages in 677 districts, and thus, the effort is to transform this into a people’s movement.
Likewise, the urban variant of the Clean India Mission aims to replicate the efforts in urban areas with focus on elimination of open defecation, modern and scientific solid waste management, capacity augmentation and effecting behavioural change regarding healthy sanitation practices. Parameters associated with cleanliness and sanitation have been included for consideration of a city under the Smart Cities Mission, another game-changer to transform the urban landscape in India.
Use of technology to keep track of targets and supervise implementation has helped in ensuring timely execution and transparency in the entire process.
Dashboards on the websites of the ministries in charge of the two sub-missions give a real-time update of the status. (At the time of writing this article, 62.6 million household toilets have been built since October, 2, 2014; 323 560 villages and 314 districts have been declared open defecation-free.
Likewise, in urban areas, 4.3 million household toilets and more than 280 000 community and public toilets have been constructed and 57 475 municipal wards have enabled door-to-door garbage collection.)
The objective of Clean India also fits in with the Sustainable Development Goals (clean water and sanitation is goal 6).
While the goals aim to achieve access to adequate and equitable sanitation and hygiene for all and end open defecation by 2030, India has focused itself upon an ambitious target of attaining this objective by October 2 next year, an objective truly ambitious in scale but attainable with participation of all.
To this effect, mechanisms have been created for involvement of corporates through their expertise as well as resources. A “Clean India Fund” has been set up to attract Corporate Social Responsibility funds and contributions from individuals and philanthropists.
In addition, corporates can adopt villages/blocks/districts and help them become open defecation-free and to improve solid and liquid waste management, provide management support to blocks/districts for triggering and construction activities, organise and sponsor training for collective behaviour change in the village/blocks/districts, participate in the clean-up of identified iconic places, and so on.
The Clean India Mission has truly found resonance among Indians, as is exhibited by their active participation in initiatives by the government as well as in their individual capacity. Innovative advertisement campaigns as well as creative use of social media has turned the Clean India Mission into a truly mass movement.
After formally launching the Clean India Mission in October 2014, Prime Minister Modi himself invoked a chain by inviting nine prominent individuals including cricket icon Sachin Tendulkar, political leader Shashi Tharoor, Bollywood actor Aamir Khan, industrialist Anil Ambani and others to spread awareness on cleanliness. Celebrities from across the sectors have lent their support through their own cleanliness and messaging drives.
India now has swachhta (cleanliness) warriors in people like Afroz Shah (a young lawyer from Mumbai known for spearheading the world’s largest beach clean-up project, also declared 2016 “Champion of the Earth” by the UN Environment Programme), Temsutula Imsong and Darshika Shah (two young women who were praised by Prime Minister Modi for their efforts at cleaning one of the iconic river banks of the holy city of Banaras), S Damodaran (founder of Gramalaya, an Indian NGO that has led successful campaigns for total sanitation in villages and slums in Tamil Nadu), and millions others in every village and city of India.
India is witnessing a cleanliness revolution at the moment, where people of all age groups and from all strata of the society are invo lved in another struggle for a clean India.
The real flag bearers, however, are the young school-going children who have taken up the initiative as their own with gusto and are turning out to be the real agents of change.
By way of a diversion, a friend’s father was recently scolded by his 8-year-old granddaughter for littering and was forced to pick up the trash.
Bad habits die hard but fresh blood maketh the change.
Shukla is Consul-General of India in Cape Town